You may remember the Tory minister Liz Truss as the woman who told parliament that barking dogs could be used to deter drones, or as the woman who got inexplicably angry about cheese, but in a bid to outdo herself she's now decided that she can convince young people to vote Tory by treating them like a pack of infinitely gullible idiots.
It's not even clear where Truss made these comments, or even if she said them at all. They appear in multiple identikit articles in the mainstream media that have presumably been churnalised from the exact same Tory press release.
The press reports all start off by repeating an extraordinary Tory insult at the 18-24 demographic. Apparently a lot of people within the Tory bubble are going around claiming that young people voted so heavily in favour of Labour at the 2017 General Election not because the Tories trashed their wages, tripled their tuition fees, gutted investment in their public services, and maliciously threatened their grandparents with "dementia tax", but because they're a gullible bunch of "sandal wearing Corbynistas"!
Truss wants to tell young people that she thinks that's wrong, but in bringing up this patronising Tory trope in the first place she's admitting that it's one that has a lot of currency within the Tory party she's desperately trying to trick young people into voting for!
The press release that Truss puts her name to carefully avoids admitting any of the Tory policies that have devastated the lives of the younger generations.
She refuses to admit Tory responsibility for tripling tuition fees and ramping up the interest rates on repayments so much that 3/4 of graduates will never fully pay back their student debts despite an entire working lifetime of paying a 9% education tax on their disposable income.
She refuses to admit Tory responsibility for the longest sustained collapse in the value of UK workers' wages since records began, meaning that the average wage is lower in real terms now than it was a decade ago.
She refuses to admit that exploitative Zero Hours Contract and fake self-employment jobs have spread like wildfire since the Tories came to power, meaning that millions of mainly younger workers are trapped in stressful and hopelessly dispiriting in-work poverty.
But worst of all is her rhetoric when it comes to housing. Truss refuses to admit that the Tory governments' between 2010 and 2017 oversaw the lowest level of new house building since the mid-1920s. She refuses to admit that the Tory government classifying £450,000 homes as "affordable" is an absolute affront to millions of younger people who could hardly imagine the possibility of getting a mortgage for half that amount. She refuses to admit that the Tories actually voted down moves to prevent unscrupulous landlords profiteering from the housing shortage by renting out properties that are unfit for human habitation.
And now she expects young people to be naive enough to believe her "jam tomorrow" promises that the Tories will "turn up the heat of competition" to build more houses in the future (as if four decades of rigid adherence to Thatcherite competition dogma isn't the biggest cause of the housing crisis in the first place).
With technology it's the same. Vote Tory for better broadband is her message, but this is completely at odds with the Tories' atrocious track record of inflicting unprecedented ideologically driven cuts in infrastructure investment.
We've spent 9 years slashing investment in infrastructure but if you vote for us next time we'll usher in a golden dawn of investment in infrastructure! - This is the absurd message she's trying to flog to the young 'uns!
And then there's this extraordinarily garbled nonsense: "The state is not always the answer to our modern problems – and it’s precisely the opposite of what the new generation want".
She's switched from vote Tory and we'll completely reverse our track record of low house building and catastrophic under-investment in infrastructure to deliver a state-led recovery to young people are anarcho-capitalists who hate the state, so they should vote Tory!
The problem of course is that the Tories know they have nothing to offer the younger generations except more austerity, more wage repression, more under-investment in infrastructure and services, more privatisation and commodification of the education system, more cuts to the social safety net, more unsustainable house price inflation, and more of the kind of regressive hard-right ultranationalism that attracted the vile blue-kip demographic to the Tory party in 2017.
They know that they have to deliver all of this because if they rowed back on any of it then their corporate backers who bankroll their party would walk away and the selfish "I'm alright Jack" bastards who apparently make up the majority of the boomer generation would revolt in fury.
 |
| The younger generations absolutely hate regressive hard-right ultranationalism, but that's exactly what the Tories need to promote in order to keep the blue-kip demographic on board. |
The Tories know that they have to tell comforting lies to the younger generations, but they simply don't even understand what young people want (aside from the desires of grotesque extreme-right freaks the Tory party have been attracting from the younger generations in recent times), so with one hand they offer them pale imitations of the workers' rights and investment economics of the 2017 Labour Manifesto, but with the other they offer them the entirely contradictory promises of even more ideologically driven marketisation of the economy and the ridiculous Tory fantasy of a hard-right anarcho-capitalist utopia.
The essential takeaway from Truss's press release is that she admits that most of her colleagues believe in the insulting caricature of the younger generations as 'sandal wearing Corbynista hippies', but she believes something different.
She believes the younger generations are a bunch of infinitely gullible political illiterates who can be tricked into voting Tory with absurdly contradictory fantasies of a Tory government delivering more state-driven investment in the things they want (decent housing and infrastructure investment) as they simultaneously brag about their plans to turn Britain into an uncaring and unresponsive anarcho-capitalist hellscape where the state does even less to protect people from the extremes of unregulated capitalism than it does in the present!
Of course Truss didn't write this speech for herself, it was cobbled together by some ridiculously over-privileged Tory wonk(s) with absolutely no idea what it's like living in the real world after almost a full decade of ruinous Tory austerity dogma, wage repression, deliberate under-investment in infrastructure and services, social security cuts, and shocking Tory inaction on issues like the housing crisis and in-work poverty.
But she's the one who put her name to this condescending and mutually contradictory rubbish as if it wasn't just another slap in the face to the 60% of young people who absolutely detest her party for the immeasurable damage the Tories have done to our country, and their futures.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
